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Quick Thoughts: Tiktik The Aswang Chronicles

Unabashedly popcorn. It’s more funny than scary, which for me is its weakness because the film’s intended to be scary. The character’s comedic quips during the supposedly frightening house siege make the audience think that if the characters are more concerned in making the audience laugh than in being genuinely scared for their lives, why should the audience care for them? No matter how impressive the CGI monsters look, I didn’t feel any sense of dread.

Dingdong Dantes for the most part succeeds in fulfilling the needed physicality of Makoy, but he wasn’t able to temper the character’s ‘bad boy’ image. A man who ventures in foreign territory insulting everyone cannot expect to escape unscathed. There’s just not a lot of shades to his characterization. Granted, it’s more the script’s fault than the actor’s. Joey Marquez is also memorable as Makoy’s uncharacteristically sympathetic future father-in-law. All the other characters are perfunctorily sketched, thus, dispensable.

All in all, while Erik Matti has given us eye candy, he could have given us something to anchor our emotions on. The film has all the requisite blood and entrails but it doesn’t have a heart.

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Tune in to DZUP 1602 on Friday (October 19) 6-7 PM for a discussion of Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles in Cine Chichirya with me as guest. You can listen to an online streaming at http://www.dzup.org.